28/06/2026
When Society Creates a Prison Without Walls
An innocent young man has lost his life. Nothing can justify that. No disappointment, no pressure, no fear and no heartbreak can make the taking of an innocent life morally right.
Yet every criminal act has a story behind it. The law punishes the act, but society must also ask what circumstances produced it.
I have often wondered whether we are too quick to classify people into two simple categories: victims and criminals, innocent and guilty, adults and children. Human life is rarely so simple.
Imagine a girl who has just crossed the age of twenty. The law calls her an adult. Society still treats her as a child.
She has never earned her own money. She has never lived alone. Every major decision of her life has been taken by her parents. She seeks permission to travel, to meet friends and sometimes even to express an opinion. She has been raised to believe that obedience to parents is a duty and that family honour is more important than personal wishes.
Then one day she is told that her marriage has been arranged.
She says she does not want it.
She says she loves someone else.
She says she cannot imagine spending her life with the man chosen for her.
At first, her words are dismissed as childish.
Then comes persuasion.
Then emotional pressure.
Then the reminder of parental sacrifices.
Then the fear of dishonouring the family.
Then the warning that society will laugh at them.
Then comes isolation. The feeling that nobody is listening.
People often ask why she did not simply walk away.
Walk away to where?
To what source of income?
To which home?
With whose support?
The law assumes choices exist because, on paper, they do. Real life is often different. Rights and the ability to exercise those rights are not always the same thing.
A person who has never made an independent decision suddenly finds herself being asked to take the biggest decision of her life by defying the very people upon whom she depends for everything.
For many mature adults this may seem easy.
For a frightened and emotionally dependent twenty-year-old, it may appear impossible.
Then comes the most dangerous emotion of all: the feeling of being trapped.
Not actual imprisonment.
Not physical confinement.
A prison of the mind.
A situation in which every door appears closed.
A situation in which a young and immature mind begins to believe that there is no acceptable escape.
The tragedy of such cases is that the perception itself may be completely wrong. There may actually be lawful alternatives and better choices. But human beings do not always act according to objective reality. They act according to what they perceive at that moment.
A young person under emotional pressure often does not think like a lawyer, a judge or a professor of law. She thinks like a frightened child. Her mind does not weigh constitutional remedies and legal rights. It thinks only of immediate fear, shame, helplessness and escape.
This does not excuse a crime.
It does not reduce the value of the innocent life that has been lost.
It simply explains how an otherwise ordinary young person can arrive at a disastrous and unforgivable decision.
The question before society should therefore not be whether the act deserves punishment. Of course it does.
The real question is whether we have the courage to admit that sometimes a crime is not born out of evil but out of immaturity, emotional dependence and circumstances that a young mind could not handle.
There is a difference between understanding and excusing.
To understand is to ask why.
To excuse is to say it was right.
It was not right.
But neither is it right to place every young offender in the same category as hardened criminals who act with complete independence, mature judgment and criminal intent developed over years.
A justice system that cannot distinguish between the two loses an important part of its humanity.
The purpose of punishment is not merely to inflict suffering. It is also to recognise the possibility of reform.
If society failed to hear a young girl's repeated cries for help, if it taught her obedience but not independence, if it gave her duties but not choices, if it made her believe that saying no was impossible, then society too must look into the mirror.
An innocent man is dead. That truth can never be changed.
But another truth also deserves to be acknowledged.
Sometimes a young person standing in the dock is not simply the author of a tragedy. She is also, in a different way, one of its victims.
The law must punish the crime.
Justice, however, must understand the circumstances that gave birth to it.
My observation on Ketan Aggarwal murder case - drafted with help of ChatGPT but views are original.
